Thursday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time
I have struggled with today’s parable. Jesus is clear that the story he is about to tell serves as an analogy for the Kingdom. So, the stakes are rather high.
The analogy for the Kingdom, Jesus says, is a king hosting a feast for his son. He sends out a bunch of invitations. Can you imagine receiving one? That would be so exciting. You could anticipate amazing food, the very best wines, incredibly interesting people, fabulous entertainment! And you would for sure have to get yourself a new outfit for the occasion!
Amazingly, as Jesus tells it, all of the people that the king invited didn’t just fail to show up (because maybe they had a previous commitment or someone in their family suddenly fell ill). They simply refused to attend.
What? What a ridiculously offensive way to respond to your king’s generosity and deep desire to celebrate his son’s wedding.
So, he gives them a second chance. He sends out another set of servants. This time, in case his invitees didn’t get it, the servants are to spell it out. The king has invited you to THE feast! You do not want to miss this! And you definitely do not want to disappoint your king.
Believe it or not, they do. Moreover, they don’t just refuse the king’s invitation. They are downright rude. They turn on their heels and get back to their daily business or, much worse, physically harm the king’s servants.
The king, rightly angered by their rude and even violent responses, retaliates with even more violence—to the point of burning down their city.
This certainly gives one pause. While the king (presumably God) is generous and wants us to join him in the feast, which is lovely, it’s also the case that—according to the analogy for God’s Kingdom—we can expect to find a lot of rudeness, lack of gratitude, and even violence. Yikes!
But then the story turns. The king says something like—“Fine. Forget all those so-called impressive people on my first guest list. Servants, gather up whomever you find out in the streets. Both good and bad,” he says. He doesn’t care if they “deserve” this great gift or not. He just wants them at his table to celebrate his son’s happy day.
Now, that sounds more like it! It turns out that the Kingdom is not about rewarding the upper crust of society—those well-heeled and smug, with overblown egos. The ones who belong at the table are the lowly, the humble, the kind of people the upper crust ignores, or often does not even see.
By contrast, the king not only sees them; he invites them in to the feast! That sounds like God’s Kingdom!
And just when I think I’ve got what Jesus is trying to tell me, the parable continues.
The king joins his guests—the good and the bad whom he has welcomed. And he encounters a man “not dressed in a wedding garment.” And he asks the man why he came to the feast without the proper clothes on. The man had no answer.
And the king’s response? Cast him out to some horrible dark place where people are suffering. And Jesus’ closing line: “Many are invited, but few are chosen.”
What? Maybe the guy couldn’t afford “wedding clothes.” Maybe what he had on was all the clothes he owned. Maybe he thought, since the servants said that all are invited—the good and the bad—that he was welcome, with or without proper attire. Yet he was not.
What are we to make of the ending to this parable?
I don’t know. And that’s is why this parable has long troubled me. It seems like it’s going one way (toward raising up those who are unseen and forgotten) and then suddenly it seems to go another way (that is cruel and hateful and mean).
At Bill’s suggestion, I am reading a modern translation of the revelations of Julian of Norwich—a mid-14th- to early 15th- century mystic who wrote down many visions she received from God. Notably, Julian’s work stands as the first published book written by a woman in English. Julian was clear that these visions weren’t just for her, and they weren’t about making her special. They were for everyone. That’s why she learned to read and write so that she could write them down.
Julian lived through the Black Plague and so witnessed untold suffering and countless, meaningless deaths in one wave after another of the pandemic. She did not have the luxury of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. I find that her book has much to teach me about how to follow Jesus in these times.
She wrote a prayer. I wonder if it might give us a hint as to what Jesus was saying in this parable.
In you, Father all-mighty, we have our preservation and our bliss.
In you, Christ, we have our restoring and our saving.
You are our mother, brother, Savior.
In you, our Lord the Holy Spirit, is marvelous and plenteous grace.
You are our clothing; for love you wrap us and embrace us.
You are our maker, our lover, our keeper.
Teach us to believe that by your grace all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Amen.
As I read this prayer again and think about this puzzling parable, the word “clothing” stands out. Jesus seems to be serious about the clothing part of the parable. What if I had the whole social justice angle wrong? What if Jesus is trying to tell us that the Kingdom is the clothing? And what if by clothing he didn’t mean “proper attire”? What if the point is that God clothes us all the time with God’s love? And what if the question for us is whether we can accept that grace?
If we could—if we could really live into the Kingdom as God’s clothing for us that is forever wrapped around us and embraces us—maybe everything would be different. Maybe then we could have faith in Julian’s remarkable claim that by God’s grace all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
Thank you, Julian (God?), for speaking to us all across the ages.
-Sue Trollinger